Stuck In Our Head: "I Still Remember" - Bloc Party

And our love could have soared / Over playgrounds and rooftops

We attended our first festival in the form of Leeds in 2007, which began the day we received our GCSE results (which were quite good if we do say so ourselves), and on the last day of the festival, rather intoxicated as we were, Bloc Party and then Arcade Fire were the last bands we witnessed. We've already banged on about how incredible Arcade Fire are on this blog, but not much have we mentioned the former. Immediate impressions to a pop lover may be of a band no different from any of the other homogenous indie shite which formed the bulk of the charts from 2004 to 2008, and while it is true that they are fond of the old guitar/bass/drum combination, they are also far more lenient towards electronic manipulation and dance-influenced instrumentation than most. It also happens that their lead singer, while being a rather arrogant cunt, is a gay, and black. Massively rare in their field, well in music in general actually, and it is undeniably brilliant to have such a public figure as a role model to the traditional indie fan base - working/middle class white, straight teenage boys.

"I Still Remember" crops up towards the end of their second album, A Weekend in the City, released a few months before our mentioned-above festival attendance. As such, it is tied into a complicated web of hormone/alcohol-influenced teenage emotions, and a turbulent period of our relatively short life. It deals with the unspoken love between two schoolboys, sung from Kele's point of view, and perfectly captures the frustrations and wishful thinking raging through the singer's mind. It's not rare for gay boys to form particularly close friendships with a straight friend at school, and to perhaps wish for much more, a theme this song reflects yet hints to affection from the other person in the friendship, something many of us in the same situation could only have wished for.

Bloc Party have a fantastic knack for creating swooning pop melodies and pairing them with lyrics as poignant and heartstring-tugging you'll get from an indie band circa 2007. This song is exceptionally special to us.

Further reading
"Sunday"- Bloc Party
"Helicopter" - Bloc Party
"One More Chance" - Bloc Party